Manuel

M

A simple circuit using : 1 green led ; 1 220 ohm resistor ; 3 connection wires

I built my first interactive circuit using a switch, a resistor, and an LED, with the Arduino acting only as a power source. I started by unplugging the Arduino, then connected its 5V pin to one of the breadboard’s power bus lines with a red wire and its GND pin to the adjacent ground bus with a black wire to keep the wiring consistent. ​ After powering the rails, I placed a pushbutton across the center gap of the breadboard so its bent legs pointed toward the middle. I then used a 220-ohm resistor to connect the 5V power bus to one side of the switch, choosing the correct resistor value using the color code reference from the book. ​ On the other side of the switch, I connected the anode (long leg) of the LED, and then wired the cathode (short leg) of the LED back to the ground bus. When I plugged the Arduino into USB to supply 5 volts and pressed the button, the LED lit up, giving me a working circuit I could control by hand.

To take things further, I added a second button and rewired the circuit so the switches worked in series. After disconnecting the power, I placed another pushbutton next to the first on the breadboard and wired the two switches one after another, then connected the anode (long leg) of the LED to the second switch and the cathode (short leg) back to ground. ​ When I powered the Arduino again, the LED would only turn on if I pressed both buttons at the same time, because the two switches were now in series and the same current had to pass through both for the circuit to be complete.

After getting the series circuit working, I rewired the two buttons in parallel so either one could turn the LED on. I left the switches and LED in place, removed the wire that linked the two switches together, then connected both switches to the same resistor on the power side and ran the other side of each switch to the LED, just like in the diagram. ​ With this new wiring, when I powered the Arduino back up, pressing either button completed the circuit and lit the LED, because the switches were now in parallel and the current could flow through whichever one I pressed.

For the spaceship interface project, I started by wiring the Arduino’s 5V and GND to the breadboard rails, just like in the previous circuit. Then I placed two red LEDs and one green LED on the breadboard, connected each LED’s cathode (short leg) to ground through a 220 Ω resistor, and wired the anode (long leg) of the green LED to digital pin 3, with the two red LEDs’ anodes going to pins 4 and 5. ​ Next, I added a pushbutton on the breadboard, again like in the earlier project, connecting one side of the switch to 5V and the other side to digital pin 2 on the Arduino. I also placed a 10 kΩ resistor between that same switch pin and ground to act as a pull-down, so when the button is not pressed the pin is held LOW, and when I press it, the pin sees 5V and goes HIGH. And this had to be programmed.

I cloned, fixed, and ran a pretty advanced full‑stack data‑viz app entirely on my own machine. I set up Node.js with nvm and switched between versions until the project worked. I cloned a real open‑source project from GitHub, opened it in VS Code, and installed all the backend and frontend dependencies with npm install, including native modules like better‑sqlite3 that had to be compiled. I installed the Visual Studio C++ build tools and wired them into Node’s build system (node‑gyp) so native code could compile on Windows. Then I ran a TypeScript Express API server (npx tsx api_server.ts) that serves data from a local SQLite database of the Epstein documents, and a React + Vite frontend (npm run dev in the network-ui folder) connected to that API. In the end I had a full interactive graph explorer of the Epstein email/document network running at http://localhost:5173, with my own machine doing all the analysis and serving.